Granta Top 20 Authors Under 40

Maybe the hype surrounding being named one of Granta's
Best American Novelists Under 40 is inherently unfair, or maybe it's
just that a wait of nine years between novels raises expectations to insupportable
levels, but whatever the case, this novel is somewhat disappointing.
It's not bad, it's just overly cute, which is the last thing you'd expect
somehow from a decade-long effort by a talented young novelist.

The story involves a librarian, Alexander Short, who is fascinated by
calligraphy,
enclosures and compartments, Samuel
Johnson, puns, the Dewey Decimal
System and various other unusual subjects. Though married (inexplicably)
to a seductive French artist, Alex has become quite frigid, to the point
where he wears a notebook on a girdle, which serves something of the role
of a chastity belt. In this book he notes down (girdles)
his daily encounters with anything that bears upon his topics of fascination.

Then one day an elegant older man puts in a call slip, in exquisite
handwriting, asking for the book Secret Compartments in Eighteenth-Century
Furniture. In no time at all, Alex is lured into Henry James
Jesson III's own set of fascinations, in particular his search for an Abraham-Louis
Breguet watch that was designed for Marie
Antoinette, the "Grand Complication" of the title. A complication
is a watch that serves additional purposes besides telling time, in this
case the Grand
Complication included such functions as a thermometer scale and a perpetual
calender that even corrected for leap years. Jesson wants it because
he owns a curio cabinet in which it once resided and he's filled all the
cubby holes with the objects the original owner kept there except for the
one in which it sat. The search is complicated by the fact that the
watch was stolen from a Jerusalem museum some years previously, while Alex's
life is complicated by his deteriorating relationship with his wife, by
run-ins with officious library staff, and by his quickening suspicions
that Jesson is not being straightforward with him.

Such is the basic set up for the book, but that's just the internal
mechanism of Kurzweil's own complication. Meanwhile, it helps to
know that the Grand Complication is a real watch that was truly stolen,
that Kurzweil received a New
York Public Library Research Fellowship, and, most of all, that much
of the action of this novel refers back to his first, A Case of Curiosities.
That tale is told by a narrator who seems now to have been Jesson.
The book starts with him telling the reader that he's purchased the cabinet,
or "case of curiosities", and that he wants to share with us the life story
of the cabinet's creator and the meaning behind each of the items within
the case. The creator turns out to have been Claude Page, an 18th
Century French watchmaker who narrowly avoided the guillotine during the
Revolution. In what seemed at the time to be little more than one
more period detail, the narrator mentioned at the end of that book that
Page at one time owned the complication.

Given all this as context, this new novel can be perceived as an enclosure
too, the prior novel embedded within it. The intertwining between
the two becomes somewhat complicated in its own right and the question
of where Jesson and/or Alex end and Kurzweil begins comes into play.
Meanwhile though, the entire shaky structure is perched upon an uncertain
foundation, the obsession of these three men (characters) with these antique
devices and the literature and ephemera of the 1700s. In A Case
of Curiosities these subjects were unfamiliar and, since the main action
of the novel was set during Page's lifetime, it seemed natural for them
to be part of the story. By the end of this current novel, the reader
of both books has been subjected to over 700 pages of this stuff--that's
a lot to ask for one cabinet full of mementos.

Further, Jesson and Short, because the action of this novel occurs in
a contemporary setting just seem like oddballs, their obsessions little
more than affectations. At one point in the novel, Jesson says :

If you ask an enthusiast of jigsaw puzzles to explain
his habit, he'll tell you what he loves is the
process. Once all the pieces are in place,
the puzzle retains little interest.

Likewise, the reader's enjoyment of this book will depend heavily on
his enthusiasm for the process, an enthusiasm which for my part I found
waning as this sequel progressed. And the finished puzzle does hold
little interest.

Were Kurzweil a first time author, of whom we expected little, these
weaknesses would be more easily excused. In fact, if you approach
the book just hoping for a mildly diverting literary thriller, it is likely
to be more than adequate. But fans of A Case of Curiosities
seem certain to be at least somewhat disappointed and there are troubling
signs within the text that another sequel will inevitably follow.
That would be inexcusable. We'll give him this one lackluster effort,
but perhaps it might be better for Mr. Kurzweil to escape from this one
cabinet and move on to some new story.